Nuclear future

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Despite the cost and the dangers of nuclear power, climate change
is strengthening the case for its more widespread use, writes Tim
Flannery.

We hear the Secretary of State [John Foster Dulles] boasting
of his brinksmanship - the art of bringing us to the edge of the
nuclear abyss.

Adlai Stevenson,
The New York Times,
February 26, 1956.

It's often said that the sun is nuclear energy at a safe
distance. In this era of climate crisis, however, the role of
Earth-based nuclear power is being reassessed, and what was until
recently a dying technology may yet create its own day in the
sun.

The revival began in earnest in May 2004, when environmental
organisations around the world were shocked to hear the originator
of the Gaia Hypothesis, James Lovelock, deliver a heartfelt plea
for a massive expansion in the world's nuclear energy programs.
Lovelock did so, he said, because he believed that climate change
was advancing so rapidly that nuclear power was the only option
available to stop

it. He compared our present situation with that of the world in
1938 - on the brink of war and nobody knowing what to do.
Organisations such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth
immediately rejected his call.

Yet Lovelock has a point, for all power grids need reliable
"baseload" generation, and there remains a big question mark over
the capacity of renewable technologies to provide it. France
supplies nearly 80 per cent of its power from nuclear sources,
while Sweden provides half and Britain one-quarter. Nuclear power
already provides 18 per cent of the world's electricity, with no
carbon dioxide emissions. Its proponents argue that it could supply
far more, but even the Bush Administration's energy forecasters
believe that its share will in fact fall - to just 10 per cent of
production - within a decade.

In discussing nuclear power as a means of creating electricity,
we must keep in mind that nuclear power plants are nothing more
than complicated and potentially hazardous machines for boiling
water, which creates the steam used to drive turbines.

As with coal, nuclear power stations are very large, about 1700
megawatts, and with a starting price of $US2 billion ($2.6 billion)
apiece they are expensive to build. The power they generate,
however, is at present competitive with that generated from wind.
Because they are large, and many factors relating to safety must be
considered, the permitting process for a nuclear power station can
take up to a decade, with construction taking about five years.
With a 15-year gestation period before any power is generated, and
even longer before any return on the investment is seen, nuclear
power is not for the impatient investor. It is this, as much as
concerns about safety, which explains why no new reactors have been
built for 20 years in either the US or Britain.

Three factors loom large in the minds of the public, however,
whenever nuclear power is mentioned - safety, disposal of waste and
bombs. The horror of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine was a
catastrophe of stupendous proportions whose consequences keep
growing. Thyroid cancer is a rare illness, with just one in a
million children developing it spontaneously. But a third of
children under four years old who were exposed to fallout from
Chernobyl will develop the disease. Seven per cent (some 3.3
million people) of the population of Ukraine have suffered illness
as a result of the meltdown, while in neighbouring Belarus, which
received 70 per cent of the fallout, the situation is even worse.
Only 1 per cent of the country is free from contamination, 25 per
cent of its farmland has been put permanently out of production,
and nearly 1000 children die each year from thyroid cancer.
Currently, 25 per cent of the Belarus budget is spent on
alleviating the effects of the disaster.

In the US and Europe, safer reactor types predominate but, as
the Three Mile Island incident shows, no one is immune to accident,
or to sabotage. With several nuclear reactors in the US located
near large cities, there are real concerns about a terrorist
attack. In summarising the situation for nuclear power as it stood
late last year, the US National Commission on Energy Policy said:
"One would want the probability of a major release of
radioactivity, measured per reactor per year, to fall a further
tenfold or more [before considering a doubling or tripling of
nuclear power capacity]. This means improved defences against
terrorist attack as well as against malfunction or human
error."

The management of radioactive waste is another issue of concern.
The nuclear industry in the US long looked to the proposed
high-level radioactive waste dump at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, as a
solution. But the waste stream has now reached such proportions
that even if Yucca Mountain were opened tomorrow it would be filled
at once and another dump would be needed. In reality, the opening
of the Yucca Mountain dump looks to be delayed for years as
challenges drag on through the courts. And the problem of what to
do with old and obsolete nuclear power plants is almost as
intractable: the US has 103 nuclear plants that were originally
licensed to operate for 30 years, but are now slated to grind on
for double that time. This ageing fleet must be giving the industry
headaches, especially as no reactor has ever yet been successfully
dismantled, perhaps because the cost is estimated to be about
$US500 million a pop.

The majority of new nuclear power plants are being built in the
developing world, where a less tight-laced bureaucracy and greater
central control make things easier. China will commission two new
nuclear power stations a year for the next 20 years, which from a
global perspective is highly desirable, for 80 per cent of China's
power now comes from coal. India, Russia, Japan and Canada also
have reactors under construction, while approvals are in place for
37 more in Brazil, Iran, India, Pakistan, South Korea and Finland.
Providing the uranium necessary to fuel these reactors will be a
challenge, for world uranium reserves are not large; at the moment
a quarter of the world's demand is being met by reprocessing
redundant nuclear weapons.

This brings us to the issue of nuclear weapons getting into the
wrong hands. As the current dispute over the proposed Iranian
reactor indicates, anyone who possesses enriched uranium has the
potential to create a bomb. As reactors proliferate and alliances
shift, there is an increasing likelihood that such weapons will be
available to those who want them.

The nuclear industry hopes that technological developments will
lead to foolproof reactors that produce electricity at a cost
equivalent to coal. New reactor types include pebble-bed reactors,
which utilise low-enriched uranium and can be built on a smaller
scale than conventional plants, and pressurised water reactors, one
of which will be built soon in Normandy, France, a plant which
promises to produce power more cheaply than coal. As with
geosequestration, however, these technologies are still to be
developed.

What role might nuclear power play in averting the climate
change disaster? China and India are likely to pursue the nuclear
option with vigour, for there is currently no inexpensive,
large-scale alternative available to them. Both nations already
have nuclear weapons programs, so the relative risk of
proliferation is not great. In the developed world, though, any
major expansion of nuclear power will depend upon the viability of
new, safer reactor types.

Humanity is at a great crossroads. Trillions of dollars will
need to be invested to make the transition to the carbon-free
economy and, once a certain path of investment is embarked upon, it
will gather such momentum, it will be difficult to change
direction.

So what might life be like if we choose one over the other? In
the hydrogen and nuclear economies the production of power is
likely to be centralised, which would mean the survival of the big
power corporations. Pursuing wind and solar technologies, on the
other hand, means that people could generate most of their own
power, transport fuel and even water (by condensing it from the
air).

If we follow this second path, we will have opened a door to a
world the likes of which have not been seen since the days of James
Watt, when a single fuel powered transport, and industrial and
domestic needs, with the big difference being that the fuel will be
generated not by large corporations, but by every one of us.

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